In Theaters: "The Ides of March"

"The Ides of March" is a well-made film that you won't give a second of thought to after you leave the theater. It is an average movie with an Oscar-season cast. I'm not sorry I saw it, but I probably wouldn't have bothered if I had been the one paying for the ticket. (I started out wanting to see "Margin Call," which looks fantastic, but then realized that it's only playing in New York and LA.)

As a person from Cincinnati, if anyone should have been biased in favor of this movie, it's me. "The Ides of March" was shot there and it was big news in the area when Clooney & Co. came. I constantly heard about sightings of cast members and people were always guessing where they would film next. Like many others, I felt obligated to see it just to play "spot the Cincinnati landmark." However, I also read many reviews beforehand so my hopes weren't sent ridiculously high.

"The Ides of March" has all the hallmarks of an Oscar movie, except the release date. The cast is A-list all the way, the plot is about heavy drama, and the tone is cynical. Ryan Gosling plays Stephen Meyers, working on a political campaign for candidate Mike Morris (George Clooney). Morris is competing against another Democrat in Ohio for the party's presidential nomination. Meyers is experienced yet idealistic as he gets wrapped up in the dirty inner-workings of a major campaign.

I was disappointed in how sorely underused most of the cast was. Gosling and Evan Rachel Wood figure prominently, while Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, and Marisa Tomei are used sparingly and each hardly get one big scene to shine. Even Clooney gets little to do aside from canned speeches until the final act. He gets some more material in a scene that is supposed to be revealing and striking, but it's actually underwhelming and predictable. All this being said, everyone does a good job. It's not surprising considering how little their roles ask of them, though. You wouldn't expect any less from these people, but you don't get any more.

What struck me most was the length of the movie - it comes in at 101 minutes, but feels much shorter. As I felt the movie wrapping up, I couldn't help but think "that was it?" It's not insulting or stupid, but the script isn't saying anything new and it is certainly not as poignant as it thinks it is. It's hard to sympathize with a disillusioned protagonist when he was very naive to begin with. Back-room deals and scandalous cover-ups are nothing new to the audience, so why does Stephen Meyers take it so hard? How could a man so experienced in political campaigns be encountering these things for the first time? Gosling has a natural intensity and grounded performance that proves he's more than a pretty face, but the script just doesn't give him enough to work with. The covered-up scandalous act, while ripped from the headlines, was tired and predictable. (If men can't keep it in their pants, they should hire uglier interns.)

This is a perfectly adequate movie. Like I said, I'm not sorry I saw it, but I certainly didn't take anything away from it. The idea of Oscar talk around it seems absolutely ridiculous to me - it's smooth, efficient filmmaking but certainly not Oscar material in any way. Perhaps it's just difficult to make a compelling story about great, big scandals that don't happen. But "The Ides of March" was never about media-rocking scandals anyway - it was about one man's path to accepting that politics is not where people play nice. This could have been an engrossing film, even without saying anything new, but it just wasn't. Instead it plays more like an after-school special as told by the Academy.

My grade: C